It had been galling to have to leave the object of our search when we’d actually been at the house, but we couldn’t have carried that trunk on our scrambling, running, gator-ridden trip to Sally.
I told Eli and John Edward I was going to clean up and they could keep talking if they wanted to. I grabbed what I needed out of my bag and the closet. I was really glad to have clean clothes. A clean bathroom. A bed with clean sheets. Not that I’d get to sleep in it.
It was a huge relief to shut the bathroom door behind me. I sat on the toilet with my hand over my face for a long moment. Then I started the water running.
I knew my day wasn’t done, as much as I wanted it to be.
Eli stuck his head in the door as I was climbing out of the tub. “We have company,” he said. “You need something?”
“I got all my clothes.” My real clothes.
When I came out in my jeans and boots, feeling like myself, Jerry Fielder was sitting in our room.
“…whole town is ready to blow up, like the train,” he was saying. He stood when I appeared. “Lizbeth,” he said.
“Dr. Fielder… Jerry. I hope your wife is well.”
“She’s pretty upset just now. I wish I’d gotten her out of Sally before today.”
I looked a question at Eli. He shook his head just a trifle. Jerry Fielder did not know what had just happened at the Ballard plantation. Eli wasn’t going to tell him, and I didn’t know why.
I heard a scream outside in the street. For the first time, I wished our window overlooked the front.
“I’m sorry now that we talked to your representative,” Jerry Fielder said. “When he first came to town and had such careful conversations with a very few people, I should have known…”
“You should have known that drastic change doesn’t come about without turmoil and bloodshed.” Eli looked… serious.
“I didn’t count on all hell breaking loose,” Jerry said, and now he was turning angry and bitter.
“This cause is a noble one, backed by our church,” Eli told him in a low, steady voice. “A noble cause doesn’t mean all the people who will benefit are noble. Or that the process of achieving our goal will be painless.”
“This town will go up in flames!” Jerry said between his teeth. He was wound so tight he might explode.
I wanted to leave the room, go to the window at the end of the hall overlooking the street, to see what was happening. But I did not dare to. I was locked in on Jerry. He didn’t sound exactly levelheaded. He and Eli were focused on each other.
“First off, maybe all hell needs to break loose here,” I said, to break the glare-down. “When people are held down like this, they’re going to rise up. Bad stuff will happen. There isn’t any sweet, reasonable way to do this.”
“This violence didn’t have to happen,” Jerry said, almost snarling. “I thought the bones of a saint would make the change… peaceful. We only have a rumor about the bones of Moses the Black, and everything is going to hell.”
Eli didn’t know what to say.
“What do you want?” I asked. Get it over with.
“I want you to bring the damn bones to town to see if you can calm things down.”
* * *
As soon as Jerry Fielder left, I went to look out. For the first time, I noticed how quiet the hotel was. I didn’t think there was anyone left who would have heard Jerry, even when he’d raised his voice a bit.
The hush was eerie, especially since there was so much noise outside. Since we’d come in the back way, we hadn’t registered what was happening on the main street. I saw whites running down the sidewalk throwing their luggage into their cars, driving away like they were possessed. The reason? The street was sprinkled with little clusters of men armed to the teeth. Some clusters were white, some were black. None were mixed.
As I watched, a brawl started. Neither of these groups was carrying guns—yet—but there were rocks and two-by-fours and iron palings and baseball bats.
I didn’t need to watch them slug it out. And they’d be running home to get their guns soon.
I went back to the room and nodded at Eli. “Bad outside,” I said. “Jerry was right. All hell is breaking loose.”
“We have to go back out to the Ballard place. We have to get a car.”
“I know where one is.”
“How so?”
“There’s a man out on the front sidewalk, dead, right by a car with its door open. I’ll get his car keys.”
Before Eli could object, I ran out of the room and down the stairs. I had my gun in my hand and I looked both ways before I ran out to the body. Keys were still in the dead man’s pocket, which was a stroke of luck.
The car was well-kept and old, an early model of the Celebrity Tourer that Eli and his late partner, Paulina, had rented for our trip to Mexico. It was a luxury car, with a panel in the roof you could fold back. That had already been done.
We piled in with all our possessions. We were not coming back to the Pleasant Stay. “You drive, I’ll shoot,” I said.
Getting to the road we’d followed before was not easy. For a while we were followed by a crowd of armed black people, who were ready to kick some white butt. I didn’t blame them. There was no way for us to explain we were on their side.
No sooner had we gone fast enough to lose them than we were surrounded by a white group coming around a corner just as we passed through an intersection. They were angry because they were sure we were fleeing. “Stay and fight!” screamed one man, waving a rifle in our direction.
“This is depressing,” Eli said.
That was not the word I was thinking of, but it was that, also. “At least we got away.”
A brick hit the hood and bounced to the ground.
“Spoke too soon,” I muttered, and Eli sped up.
I’d been threatened and chased. Someone would pay for the tension that was making my muscles tighten and my nerves hum.
When I saw a man running straight for the car with a burning bottle in his hand, I popped up through the roof and shot him. Lucky I did. The bottle blew up in his hand when he hit the ground.
Eli yelled. My gun going off had been a complete surprise. He hadn’t seen the man coming, he’d been concentrating so hard on driving.
And that was why he needed me.
Eli was more alert to our surroundings after that. “Group coming up on the left,” he said, steering closer to the curb on the right. I was up and pointing both guns at them before he finished. It was a group of black men and some women, too.
“It was her,” one of the women shouted, and I recognized the maid, Myra, from the Ballard place. “She’s good.”
And they all halted in their tracks, and let us go by.
“Did she mean ‘good’ as in ‘good shot,’ or ‘good’ as in against the forces of evil?” Eli said.
“Don’t know, don’t care. As long as they held back.” All of a sudden I felt how tired I was. It had been a long, long day and it was not yet over. We were on our way back to the Ballard house. I dreaded it.
At least some things I’d feared came to nothing. When we turned into the driveway, the men who’d tracked us were gone. The lawn and driveway were marked with the tire tracks of several cars or trucks, and there were footprints everywhere. A dog had been all over, I could smell the scent of its markings. There was a sad air hanging about the huge house.